FreeNAS is a very popular platform for Network Area Storage. The latest release of FreeNAS is FreeNAS version 8, which is quite different from previous releases. There is no direct upgrade path to FreeNAS version 8 from its previous versions, the system requirements also have changed considerably. Before you take the leap to the new version, its a great idea to try installing the new FreeNAS 8 platform in a virtual machine, without risking your current data. In this step by step article we will show you how to install FreeNAS 8 on a virtual machine on a VMWare server. We are just using VMWare server as a Virtual Machine hosting platform, but the configuration steps will be similar for other virtualization platforms such as VirtualBox, Hyper-V etc.

In this article we will explain how to change the default remote desktop port on Windows Seven to a custom port. The default port is TCP 3389 but a lot of systems administrators like to change this due to a variety of reasons. The biggest reason is to hide it as a "visible" port for hackers to attack, as hackers normally target to most obvious ports to gain access to a system. Another reason for changing the default RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) listening port could be that you want to avoid or bypass firewall restrictions, often put in place on outgoing and incoming connections to a remote or local machine.

In an earlier article we showed you How you can disguise yourself as the GoogleBot. Following the same lines, in this article today we will show you how you can very easily make your browsing session appear as if it was a GoogleBot or YahooBot. You might ask why you ever want to do this, strictly not to do anything illegal. Most websites do not block Search Engine bots to crawl their pages and for indexing purposes they definitely allow GoogleBot and YahooBot. Hence, if you are in a fix sometimes and you need to get to page where you have forgotten your user credentials, or if the particular web page needs you to register first etc, you can use this method to get to it in a jiffy.

In this article we will show you how you can disable User Access Control (UAC) for administrators on a Windows 2008 server. If you are a Windows Vista user you might have experienced the nagging UAC warnings a lot which come up when you want to perform actions that need elevated approval. UAC got much better in Windows Seven and it does have its merits on a workstation but administrators usually know what they are doing on a server, UAC only gets in the way for them. To make life easier, we will demonstrate how you can turn UAC off for members of the administrators group only on a Windows Server 2008.

HomeGroups is a new feature introduced in Windows Seven, which lets you share libraries, documents, music, videos, printers etc with other computers in your home network securely. You no longer need to email documents etc from one computer to another. In this article we will show you, how you can add a HomeGroup to Windows Seven and what it can do for you. Once created, you will be able to join other Windows Seven machines to this HomeGroup and share Media, Documents and Folders. You will also be able to configure what you want to exclude from being shared such as particular libraries, folders and files